How can any honest woman in Mexico, regardless of her ideology, remain silent?

May 3rd and 4th, 2004 will be remembered as some of the saddest and most violent days in the modern history of San Salvador Atenco, on the outskirts of the Mexico City megalopolis. This small town, home to 33 thousand people who still depend on peasant economy, witnessed a violent clash between 300 unarmed civilians, members of the Frente de Pueblos en la Defensa de la Tierra (Peoples Front for the Defense of the Land), and some 4000 policemen from the state and various corporations. The police put the demonstrators down and terrorized the whole community, raiding houses, breaking down doors and arresting without warrants 207 people, including children, women, and the elderly. At the end of the day, 20 people had been seriously injured and a minor was dead.

What had started as a demonstration to support eight street vendors from the neighboring town of Texcoco became a violent clash which most of the media described as the ‘return to the rule of law’ after the arbitrary actions of a ‘radical group.’ The image of a group of peasants from Atenco battering a fallen policeman was shown again and again to justify the State’s use of violence. The loss of control and violence by a few were used to disqualify a whole movement and to characterize it as a destabilizing and dangerous force for the State and the population in general. The attack on the policeman should have been punished according to the law, and considering there were plenty of images of the event, it would have been possible to identify the attackers. Instead, state and federal authorities chose to unleash the full force and violence of the state on innocent people, many of whom don’t even belong to the group the authorities aimed to disband.

The testimonies of the men and women arrested on these two days, which are now beginning to emerge thanks to human rights organizations, speak of physical and sexual violence on a par with the worst days of the dictatorships in South America. But why use such a show of violence against a group of unarmed, poor peasants? Why use sexual violence against the women in the movement? Was it not against the state’s own interests to issue such a repressive response, now that Mexico has been chosen as founding member of the United Nations’ recently created Human Rights Council?

Scholars who have studied the social effects of violence and terror have pointed at the difficulty of analyzing and ‘explaining’ them from a scholarly point of view. Australian anthropologist Michael Taussig (Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man,1987) refers to the effect of terror by saying that the stories of violence confronted him with an interpretation problem, until he realized that the problem of interpretation is essential for the reproduction of terror; it not only makes it very difficult to create an effective counter-discourse, but at the same time it empowers the terrifying aspects of death squadrons, disappearances and torture, because it causes demobilization and limits people’s capacity to resist. Since terror depends so much on interpretation and sense, it ends up feeding on itself by destroying any evidence of sense and rationality.

In the same way, the disproportionate violence with which those arrested at Atenco were treated has the double effect of demobilizing and inspiring skepticism about what happened, thus making it difficult to create a counter-discourse, break the silence in which our indignation has left us and shake off the indifference that has crept after some of the political prisoners were liberated.

A Symbol of Resistance: Frente de Pueblos para la Defensa de la Tierra

The representations that the news media has constructed around the Frente de Pueblos en Defensa de la Tierra show a movement of a violent and intolerant nature while at the same time minimizing the numbers of its adherents and their politics and discrediting their leaders. These representations bear little resemblance to the men and women I had the opportunity to meet this past April. They appeared a cheerful, supportive, and inclusive group, well organized and capable of complex political thought. I met them just a few weeks before the fateful clash, at La Cañada de los Sauces, in Cuernavaca, Morelos, in one of the most festive, socially inclusive resistance demonstrations I have ever attended.

During the memorial festivities of Emiliano Zapata, I was among the supporters of the Otra Campaña in Morelos state, the name given to the tour of Mexico by the Zapatistas (EZLN) during the Presidential campaign, awaiting the arrival of Sub-Comandante Marcos to the town of Tetelcingo. Suddenly it was announced that the meeting was moving to La Cañada de los Sauces, in the residential neighborhood of Tabachines, where police were about to force out a group of residents and environmental activists who had chained themselves to trees. They were protesting the construction of a road that would cross the area and required cutting down the ancient willow trees. The arrival of the Otra Campaña at La Cañada forced out the police, the ambulances, and the bulldozers which were ready to bring down the trees and their guardians.  A little while later, about 200 men and women peasants from San Salvador Atenco arrived, marching in order and keeping time with the metallic clatter of their machetes. They came in support of the people of La Cañada de los Sauces, just like they had in previous days supported the indigenous community of Cacahuatepec, Guerrero, who oppose the construction of the a dam that would expropriate their communal land, and the people of Cuernavaca who resisted the construction of a COSTCO store to protect the historical murals of the old Casino de la Selva, or the people of Texcoco who protested the construction of a Wall Mart across from the ancient pyramids of Teotihuacan. The peasants of Atenco supported the struggle of these communities and shared with them their experience and strategies. Their success in 2002, when they managed to stop the government building an international airport that would have expropriated five thousand hectares of farming land, has made them into a symbol of resistance against the blows of globalization. These local struggles share a search for alternative ways of development that are respectful of nature and of the historical heritage of communities. The success of the movement in Atenco was proof that it is possible to say NO to the neoliberal economic model which is indifferent to people’s wellbeing and excludes the majority of them.  This was the message that the Frente de Pueblos en Defensa de la Tierra brought to the residents of La Cañada in Cuernavaca, a message that encouraged them to continue resisting. In their speeches, they said that the struggle to defend the old trees of La Cañada was similar to the struggle of many indigenous and peasant peoples in Mexico. The words and songs they brought seemed to melt the barriers between social classes. The meeting became a great popular gathering. The housewives of La Cañada cooked and fed everyone, the workers of the Pascual Boing co-op handed out fruit drinks and the peasants from Atenco enlivened the evening singing corridos about their struggles. The women danced in pairs, clashing their machetes high above their heads in a slow, ritual dance reminiscent of religious dances in indigenous communities. These were strong, extroverted women who shouted out resistance slogans and wielded their machetes with the ease of those who use them in everyday tasks. I could not help thinking of the Zapatista women and of many other women who are fighting from the bottom of society to build a fairer life. I felt inundated by their political energy. I would never have guessed that a few weeks later I would see these same women beaten, bloodied, humiliated, silenced… the political energy I felt that evening in April was a danger the government aimed to eradicate.

As an analyst of social movements, I was impressed by the organizational expertise the Frente de Pueblos possessed. I was awed by their ability to systematize the history of their struggle in songs, by the strength of the women, who seemed to play a central role in the movement, and by the obvious influence the group had over the young students who were at the meeting.
Among the crowd, I had the opportunity to witness an informal ‘passing of the torch’ ritual in which an elder from Atenco gave a young woman student from the University of Chapingo his machete. A group of young people crowded around, cheering and shouting slogans, while the man addressed an improvised speech to the girl, who received the machete in recognition of her solidarity with the peasant movement. I wonder now if that girl was among the women who were raped and abused in the jail of Santiaguito. Could it be that that was the punishment for taking on the torch?

At the time I thought it would be a good idea to have one of my students analyze this experience. Perhaps that is also what the teachers at the National School of Anthropology and History thought. Two of their students are now facing criminal charges for being in Atenco on May 4th.

That afternoon at La Cañada de los Sauces the police stayed away, and eventually the residents were able to negotiate with the government to save the willows. The political cost of upsetting a residential community or breaking through the home of a Public Attorney that lives in that neighborhood, would have been too high. But repression came later, in lands of poorer people, where it seems it is easier to silence complaints and break down a movement in the name of the rule of law.

State Violence: Breaking Down the Movement

My previous encounter with the group Frente de Pueblos en Defensa de la Tierra made me feel suspicious of the images of extreme violence that showed some people of Atenco beating on a policeman. Up to now, the media has failed to give the names or the histories of the attackers, and it is not that far-fetched to think that the movement could have been infiltrated by provocateurs that would then provide the cue to unleash a campaign of repression. It may also be that years of accumulated grief and struggle exploded in an incident of irrational violence for which the movement will have to pay a high price. I do not know what happened, but what is plain and what we have to say over and over again is that nothing justifies police violence, or the violation of the human rights of those taken into custody.

The State’s legislature had significant foresight when it approved in February 1994 the Law to Prevent and Punish Torture, which establishes that any public officer who inflicts ‘blows, mutilations, burns, physical or psychological pain, or who withholds food and water’ from a person in custody is guilty of torture, as is ‘any public officer who instigates, compels, authorizes, orders or consents to the aforementioned. …torture is considered a crime and this is not affected by exceptional situations, such as internal political instability, urgent investigations, or other circumstances. Neither can it be excused because it was carried out under superior orders.’ (See www.edomex.gob.mx/legistel/cnt/LeyEst).

During the police raids in Atenco, houses were broken into and destroyed without search warrants, 207 people were taken into custody without arrest warrants, a minor was murdered, 20 people were severely injured-one of whom is still in a coma, (a 20 years undergraduate student of the National University (UNAM)). There were 23 sexual assaults on women, seven of which were rapes. The National Human Rights Commission (CNDH) has received 150 complaints from residents of Atenco. The authorities, whether municipal, state, or federal, have so far failed to accept responsibility for what happened, and President Vicente Fox has justified the use of violence by the police as ‘the means to bring peace to the people of this community in the midst of rising violence’ (La Jornada May 13 2006).

Of those arrested on May 3rd and 4th, 17 were freed, 144 were charged with damage to public property, a misdemeanor for which they can be released on bail, and 28, including the leader of the Frente de Pueblos en Defensa de la Tierra, Ignacio del Valle Medina, as well as his son, César del Valle, have been formally indicted under charges of false imprisonment and damage to public property. While authorities use the law at their discretion against social leaders, those responsible for the violations to human rights in Atenco are still shamelessly speaking of rule of law.

We need to take the government’s discourse about using the full weight of the law in the case of Atenco and make it our own: we must demand the just punishment of government officials responsible for the abuses.

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